by Hamish McBrearty

Created on: June 25, 2008

While travelling around Paris, I remarked to my wife that many of the landmarks in that beautiful city are named after famous battles or places that were conquered, which perhaps shows how far back the human race's history of violence goes.

These days violent video games seem to be the big boogie man which get the blame for leading the youth astray, but this tendency toward violence seems to have always been there, even if the influence appears to have changed over the years. Back in the 1950s it was comic books and rock n roll music which was causing "juvenile delinquency", fast forward to the 1980s and it was sexual content in movies and television, the 1990s violent movies, and in the past 15 years: video games.

But if all these things have caused various ills in the youth of society so consistently, why has society not completely broken down? If Grand Theft Auto is used by young people to train for murders and robberies, and the most recent game in this series sold 4.5 million copies, then why haven't we noticed society's decent into anarchy?

The reason is, out of the millions of people worldwide who enjoy these kinds of games, only a fraction of a percentage go on to commit some horrible act which could be linked to the game. In fact, if comics, music, violence in movies, sex on TV and video games have all been claimed to cause this kind of behaviour, perhaps it is just our very nature for a small number of people to do these horrific things.

After the Columbine School shooting, the media attempted to link the game Doom to the actions of the killers, but nobody has ever attempted to link Brenda Ann Spencer, one of the first school shooters, to video games. Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant, who killed 35 people in five hours, was never linked to video games.

The fact is that as with any group, even those who commit violent crimes, some will be avid video gamers, but to suggest that games led them to their violent acts is spurious logic. But in this age of passing the buck, it is very easy for society to blame some popular form of entertainment, particularly one they do not understand, than take a look at the individual person and hold them responsible for their actions.

If there is a common theme between video games, movies, television and comics is that they are forms of entertainment which are typically enjoyed by young people, but not by a majority of adults. It is then very easy for those adults to dismiss their legitimacy as entertainment purely on the grounds that they themselves do not understand it, and to blame them for the youth's aberrant behaviour.

But like it or not, violence is in our nature whether we see it on TV, in video games or not, and there will always be those who commit acts we cannot understand. But those acts are the fault of that individual alone, not video games, not television, not movies. And that is a distinction many today wilfully fail to see.

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